Keywords:

Emerg Infect Dis

Emerging Infect. Dis

EID

Emerging Infectious Diseases

1080-60401080-6059

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

3367659

AD-1112

10.3201/eid1112.AD1112

Another Dimension

The Enigma We Answer by Living

Deming

Alison Hawthorne

Address for correspondence: EID Editor, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1600 Clifton Rd NE, Mailstop D61, Atlanta, GA 30333, USA; email: eideditor@cdc.gov

122005

111219271927

Keywords: poemenigmaEinstein

Einstein didn't speak as a child

waiting till a sentence formed and

emerged full-blown from his head.

I do the thing, he later wrote, which

nature drives me to do. Does a fish

know the water in which he swims?

This came up in conversation

with a man I met by chance,

friend of a friend of a friend,

who passed through town carrying

three specimen boxes of insects

he'd collected in the Grand Canyon—

one for mosquitoes, one for honeybees,

one for butterflies and skippers,

each lined up in a row, pinned and labeled,

tiny morphologic differences

revealing how adaptation

happened over time. The deeper down

he hiked, the older the rock

and the younger

the strategy for living in that place.

And in my dining room the universe

found its way into this man

bent on cataloguing each innovation,

though he knows it will all disappear—

the labels, the skippers, the canyon.

We agreed then, the old friends and the new,

that it's wrong to think people are a thing apart

from the whole, as if we'd sprung

from an idea out in space, rather than emerging

from the sequenced larval mess of creation

that binds us with the others,

all playing the endgame of a beautiful planet

that's made us want to name

each thing and try to tell

its story against the vanishing.

From Genius Loci by Alison Hawthorne Deming

Suggested Citation: Deming, AH. The Enigma We Answer by Living [another dimension]. Emerg Infect Dis [serial on the Internet]. 2005, Dec [date cited].http://dx.doi.org/10.3201/eid1112.AD1112